


The Movie of My Angst

by Jennifer-Oksana (JenniferOksana)



Category: Birds of Prey (Comic)
Genre: F/F, Fluff and Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-09
Updated: 2016-01-09
Packaged: 2018-05-12 17:30:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5674531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JenniferOksana/pseuds/Jennifer-Oksana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is pizza, a movie, meta-commentary, discussion of disability issues, and kissing. Plus, Babs and Dinah discuss the Super-mullet of the early 90s.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Movie of My Angst

 

“It’s my fucking body and I said NO!”

Dinah groaned. By her count, this was the third time this week Barbara had put on _Passion Fish_ , which meant that Babs was in a bad mood and intended to wallow deeply in it. And Dinah totally understood the need to movie-medicate the occasional funk the superhero lifestyle could put a girl in.

But at this point, _Dinah_ had the damn movie memorized. Dinah, who much preferred such classics as John Woo’s _Once a Thief_ to break her out of a bad mood.

“Babs, honey?” Dinah asked. “It’s me. I brought pizza. And a twenty-dollar gift certificate to Blockbuster, because…”

A disgruntled noise answered Dinah’s trailing comment.

“Why do you hate every movie I love?” Barbara asked as Dinah sat down on the couch. “Passion Fish is a good movie. It’s better than say, The Fast and Furious. Which you made us watch.”

“Yes. I thought so, too. The first twelve times I saw it,” Dinah agreed, opening the pizza box and grabbing a gooey slice of sausage, cheese, and mushroom. “Now I just dread hearing this movie. Because it is the movie of your angst.”

“Angst? When did you learn the word angst?” Babs asked, pausing the DVD.

“Between Ollie and Roy and Helena…not to mention the time I’ve spent with you and your Bat-friends?” Dinah inquired, passing the box off to Babs and sucking up a thread of cheese off her pizza. “It’s a necessary vocab word.”

“It is not the movie of my angst,” Babs said indignantly. “This is a good movie. Also, look! Gimp who isn’t there just to teach us all a valuable lesson about valuing diversity! With sexual desire, even. I think this might be the only movie where that happens. Ever.”

“You just wish you were Mary McDonnell,” Dinah said. “Even with her bad, bad hair.”

“It was the early nineties,” Babs answered idly, handing the pizza box back to Dinah, who stuck it on the couch between them. “ _Everyone_ had bad hair. Do you remember Superman’s, for example?”

Dinah cracked up, snorting up a little pizza cheese and choking in the process. Barbara wheeled over, ready to thump her friend on the back, but she was laughing, too.

“Did anyone ever tell him it was a mullet?” Dinah finally asked in a hushed whisper, full of hidden laughter.

“No, no one did,” Babs answered, chuckling. “Maybe you could bring it up.”

“Ha. Ha. Ha,” Dinah said. “So, what made you turn to the movie of your angst this time? Nightwing? Batman? Helena? Some other event you’re blaming yourself for?”

Babs glared and shrugged. “I was alone. I thought you were out for the day, so I went a-blog-reading,” she said. “There was this really shitty thread on one of my favorite blogs about sterilizing women that was…” and Babs whistled. “I forget, sometimes, how much people can’t deal with us gimps.”

“You’re not a gimp,” Dinah protested. “You’re you. Oracle. Barbara Gordon. More awesome than us all.”

“And a cripple. Among the differently-abled. Without the use of my legs,” Babs said heavily. “You asked me, a long time ago, if people dealt with that well. The answer is no. There’s quite a few reasons why Oracle is a very private entity, even from the Justice League. Including my favorite, ‘it’s good that you still have this to keep you going.'”

Dinah stared at her best friend. Opened her mouth. Closed it. Stared some more.

“Damn,” she finally said.

“Can I turn on the movie of my angst now?” Babs asked, sounding plaintive.

“Sure, angst away,” Dinah said, staring away from Barbara as she thumbed on the DVD. “Shit.”

“What’s that?” Babs asked, the glow of the movie turning her face all eerie.

“Do I do that?” Dinah said. “Because I don’t mean it if I do that. Because I…you’re awesome, right? You’re awesome whether or not your legs work. And I only want you to be happy.”

Babs didn’t say anything, but that was very much par for the course. Besides, she was eating pizza and watching a movie, and Dinah wasn’t going to feel awkward just because she’d tried to convince her best friend she didn’t really care about her disability in a stupid, awkward way, and her best friend was ignoring her.

“You don’t do it,” Babs said. “Not really. The only thing you do isn’t about the chair or anything like that.”

“So what do I do?” Dinah asked, feeling awkward, sensitive, and a little bit like Chantelle. Except she wasn’t a servant, and the idea of Babs drinking too much white wine and watching soap operas to get over her loss was laughable.

Guy playing Rennie would make a good Nightwing, though.

“You pretend you’re not flirting with me. I can’t tell if it’s because of the chair or because our love is a pure, spiritual love, or if you’re like my sister…” and Babs had gone beet red to her ears. “God, I suck.”

“A pure, spiritual love?” Dinah asked. “Did you lose your mind somewhere around the fifth consecutive watching of this movie? Our love is many things, but seriously, pure and spiritual?”

“Would I have been better off with ‘our love is god; let’s go get a slushie?'” Babs asked.

“Coke or cherry?” Dinah retorted.

“Cherry,” Babs answered. “So our love…”

“Is God,” Dinah said.

Babs looked back at the screen, wistfully looking at her movie. “I really do like this movie, you know. Not just because it’s the only movie ever with a redheaded wheelchair-bound heroine. The women end up together, even with men in their lives and shitty things all around,” she said. “I can’t watch another movie where the women end up happily ever after with the boys.”

“I heard that,” Dinah said, feeling a little out of sorts. “You know, we could rent Heathers. That also has an ending where the girls tells the boys to fuck off and all.”

“Plus, things explode,” Babs said with a tolerant smile. “I will save the movie of my existential angst for a time when you’re not in the mood to hang out, then.”

“I could go,” Dinah said.

“Dinah,” Babs said in her best prissy-librarian-explains-it-all voice. “If you go, I will be pissed off and assume our love is no longer pure and divine.”

Dinah glowered. “No more purity and divinity,” she said.

“I thought you were straighter than an arrow, Dinah,” Babs taunted. “And hence the only way you could be into me is in a pure way.”

Okay, that was just using Dinah’s stupider moments against her. “Because you know, ditching me all the time to suck face with Nightwing convinces me ours is a gay, sexual love,” Dinah answered, just as taunt-y.

“Ours doesn’t have to BE a gay and or sexual love,” Babs said. Dinah snickered, because sure, that was why Babs was being clingy and protective, because it was of course a non-gay love.

“It’s at least a bi-curious love,” Dinah said. “Power Girl _has_ referred to me as your girlfriend.”

“That just makes it a heterodefiant love,” Babs said. “Inevitably sexualized by the forces of sexism. Also, Karen has many personal reasons for saying you’re my girlfriend, most of them about bitterness.”

“A…you made that word up,” said Dinah, shaking her head. “Heterodefiant. Seriously, now you’re just being snarky for the sake of sounding smart and bitter. Which is very Batman of you, Babs. We need to get you laid before your brain strangles your libido.”

“Oh, I see. So are you going to introduce me to a guy you know, just to tell me that I can’t date him, because it would irritate Nightwing, who I can’t date, and then we end up having ice cream and talking about cute male butts instead of having a make-out session because you feel awkward about the chair?” Babs replied sharply.

Well. Apparently Babs had thought about this. And the pat way she said it made Dinah feel a little worse, because damn. When Babs put it that way, it did seem a little bit passive-aggressive.

“Well?” Babs asked, and Dinah realized her best friend and possible repressed love interest was glaring at her.

“This is awkward,” Dinah said.

“No, really?” Babs replied. Dinah snorted. “What? You deny your cockblocking?”

“No, I don’t,” Dinah said. “Damn, that was kind of passive-aggressive of me.”

Babs nodded evenly. “Even my father knows, Dinah,” she said. “He asked, during the big revelations about being Batgirl and Oracle and whatnot. He asked about you. And when Jim Gordon is pretty sure we’re having an affair, well…”

Dinah laughed expressively, and in one of her few suave romantic moves ever, leaned over and kissed Babs in mid-rant, wrapping an arm around Barbara Gordon’s lovely waist as the tension flooded out of Babs into the kiss.

Kissing girls wasn’t nearly as weird as Dinah thought. Babs tasted like pizza and coffee and had nice lips. And she was Babs. It wasn’t like Dinah was going to have to make any radical personality adjustments to handle Babs.

“Dinah?”

“Power Girl is probably not entirely wrong,” Dinah said, leaning down again for another kiss. “I am so very much your girlfriend.”

And Babs looked up at Dinah. Dinah expected something eloquent, something that reflected Babs the Supergenius as well as Babs, good at snark at precious moments.

But instead? Babs said, “Neat.”

“Neat,” Dinah said. “Neat?”

“Um,” Babs said. “I have your breasts two inches from my eyes and for the first time ever, it’s okay to look at them in a sexual way. My brain is…” and she waved her hand.

Dinah almost laughed. Oh, this was going to be so much fun, if she could break Barbara’s brain just by jiggling. Better than torturing Ollie, almost. Definitely as good as sassing Batman in the name of her girls.

“Oh,” Dinah said, brushing Babs’s face with her hand and grinning at the serendipity of the moment. “Neat.”


End file.
